I have seen the future and it is dressed up with far too many adjectives.
At a recent James Beard Foundation Dinner, described in the Chicago Tribune as "culinary alchemy" and a "food revolution," items included a hollow sphere of watermelon and saffron frozen in liquid nitrogen (basically a hollow popsicle without the stick) and
Chino Farms Carrots and Venezuelan Chocolate with chocolate crepe, milk jam sauce, Indonesian long pepper ice cream, chocolate caramel sauce, cherry vinegar, and microbasil.
Is that a dish or a list of ingredients? It's not complexity I'm opposed to, but the flaunting of complexity itself as a feature. Indonesian long pepper ice cream is really just ice cream flavored with long Indonesian peppers, no more exotic in principle than vanilla. I'm not against naming your sources, but there are more subtle ways to do it. Chefs, like writers, need to learn the value of brevity. If anything, food should be more complicated than it looks rather than the other way around.
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